Peg’s Posts: Rockin’ it in AZ

After a frightening porta-jill experience (is there ever a good one at a huge race?), I wandered off to find my start corral. Corral #2—so close to the start, I could see corral E, where the elites line up. Cool. Even cooler was seeing a friend I’d met at a Girls on the Run conference last year—Paula, a long-time council director for the central NY council, now transitioning out of that role and onto others. Conversation turned to special people in our lives and I learned she’s fast friends with John L. Parker, Jr, author of my fav running book, Once a Runner and the sequel, Again to Carthage. Two books that quite possibly kept me off the injured list before my Boston Marathon last year. Had nothing to do with training tips. Had everything to do with being so wrapped up in a story, I made less time for emails and “stuff” in the evenings, more time to crawl into bed and devour pages.

Finally, it was time for the real pre-race rituals and I was glad to get moving. My goal was to run a 1:45 — close to my time from the last half marathon I raced. I hadn’t trained for faster, so I knew it wouldn’t be wise to get greedy. Oh yes, and my husband’s last words as I left the house the day before was “don’t try to break a record.” Translated: don’t get hurt. So my plan, as usual, was to go out easy, mind the splits on my Forerunner 210, maintaining just over 8 min miles for the first half and then pick it up a bit for the next 6.5 miles. The course was flatter than any 13.1 miles I’ve done in KC, so keeping a fairly even pace was easy. I finally relaxed after the 6 mile mark and by mile 10, was ready to pick up the pace a bit. My finish time of 1:45:26 was right on target and I was still smiling by the end. At least I think I was cheesing pretty heavily for my post-race finish line photo. For a Rock’n’Roll event, that’s the name of the game — good times from start to finish. I suddenly realized I was feeling extremely hydrated (code for “find me a porta jill on the double). The next adventure was figuring out how to find my ride. My coworker and travel partner Mika had graciously offered to meet me somewhere beyond the finish. We just didn’t know where yet. Needless to say, she used a lot of Garmin nav and a little luck to get around the blocked streets to find me and more of the same to get back to our hotel. More on the next stage in our multi-point adventure in another post.

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